Isis unveiled: HP has opened the source code of the webOS Web browser

HP has opened the source code of Isis the webOS Web browser, which is powered …

HP has published the source code of Isis, the webOS Web browser. The company has also released the code of the browser's underlying HTML rendering engine, which is based on QtWebKit. The code is available from GitHub and is distributed under the permissive Apache license.

The webOS platform is built on top of Linux, but has a proprietary userspace stack. HP announced in December that it would open the platform's source code and continue developing it in collaboration with the open source software community. HP began publishing the code last month with the release of the Enyo JavaScript framework. The release of the browser today is another step forward for HP's webOS open source roadmap.

The webOS browser has been spun off into a new project called Isis, with the aim of making it cross-platform compatible. The browser's user interface is built with Enyo and is powered by QtWebKit, a port of the WebKit rendering engine that is part of the open source Qt development framework.

The Qt framework is owned by Nokia, but is used by other mobile platform vendors, including RIM and HP. One of the chief advantages of Qt is that it is highly portable. Using QtWebKit to supply the underlying HTML rendering engine for Isis will make it easier to bring the browser to additional mobile platforms.

Isis supports the Netscape Plugin API (NPAPI), which means that it is designed to support Flash and other browser plugins that handle embedded Web content. The browser itself doesn't come with a Flash implementation, of course, so it will only support the plugin on platforms where Flash is available.

Good to see. I really, REALLY want to see a ton of different, standards compliant browsers. Safety through diversity. And, honestly, if it's lightweight? Fantastic... I know a lot of people with smartphones and computers that are a bit long in tooth (relatively speaking).

With half the "world" running on webkit, i am unsure how diverse things realy are...

Yup. The only 'diversity' is another skin on top of WebKit.

Clearly you don't know the first thing about browsers. Webkit is not a large part of the browser, its only the rendering engine. 3d acceleration, javascript, cookies, http stack, and dozens and dozens of other bits are all not part of webkit.

Browser was pretty terrible when I last used it. Maybe there's some hope for some significant improvements.

The Ars report is a bit misleading. Isis is not the current webOS browser. It is a new version of the webOS browser. From the press release:

Quote:

QtWebKit (a.k.a. “Cute” WebKit) was originally open sourced by Nokia. We have been in the process of moving webOS to this port of WebKit for some time, with a goal of increasing web site compatibility and overall performance. Today we are ready to release the first part of this effort to the open source community—the Isis web browser.

sonicmerlin wrote:

Also why the devil did HP fire all its developors, who could have spent the last several months tweaking the OS to make it run faster?

They didn't fire the developers. They axed the hardware people. They kept the software people (although a good number of them probably have since left on their own).

hobgoblin wrote:

What gets my head going here is that we are looking at a browser with the main interface formed using html and js...

With half the "world" running on webkit, i am unsure how diverse things realy are...

Yup. The only 'diversity' is another skin on top of WebKit.

Clearly you don't know the first thing about browsers. Webkit is not a large part of the browser, its only the rendering engine. 3d acceleration, javascript, cookies, http stack, and dozens and dozens of other bits are all not part of webkit.

3D acceleration is part of WebKit/Gecko. etc.

So is JavaScript, WebKit has JavaScriptCore (aka Nitro) in it for example.

Networking is not, that is true (Chrome and Firefox use the same library for that).

With half the "world" running on webkit, i am unsure how diverse things realy are...

Yup. The only 'diversity' is another skin on top of WebKit.

Clearly you don't know the first thing about browsers. Webkit is not a large part of the browser, its only the rendering engine. 3d acceleration, javascript, cookies, http stack, and dozens and dozens of other bits are all not part of webkit.

3D acceleration is part of WebKit/Gecko. etc.

So is JavaScript, WebKit has JavaScriptCore (aka Nitro) in it for example.

Networking is not, that is true (Chrome and Firefox use the same library for that).

Yes, sorry, WebKit does seem to have 3d acceleration of some type built in. It also lists as a component javascriptcore, however, not every browser is required to use it. Chrome uses a different engine obviously.

The point is, however, that browsers are more than just the rendering engine. If they weren't there would be no difference between chrome, safari, mobile safari, android browser, and chrome on android. However, besides their UI and features, and plugins being completely different, their performance and rendering techniques differs greatly. There is more to a browser than Webkit.